According to Hansel and Gretel, if you leave little crumbs along a path you will be able to find your way home. Home like in life, is the place where you want to be. On a website, you start at the home and it is usually the first place you go back to when you are lost or can’t find what you’re looking for. There have been studies that show when most users cannot find what they want; they go back to the home page to start over. There are many ways to set-up your navigation. A popular method is known as Bread Crumb Navigation, and for web design, this is imperative.

Breadcrumb navigation is a way of setting up your navigation so that a user always knows where, within the main site, they are. This can be extremely useful if you have a lot categories and or a lot of content. Here is how it works. First, you have your main category home, and then let us say you move into another category like books. Therefore, it would look like this: Home > Books. Look at the picture below.

Do you see how it works? It’s really quite simple, you have a home category then a group of the largest categories and then sub categories within each on of those and so on and so forth. It’s a simple way to organize your navigation bar. There are different ways this navigation is setup and it varies for each web design. The picture above the navigation is shown with right arrows however, some designers use pipes, colons, slashes, bullets, text and even sometimes left arrows. Here are a few examples:

All are a little different but the overall principle still applies. People especially these days are notorious for having short attention spans so simplicity is very important. Whichever way is the simplest to understand, is the best way for your website. Some may be more difficult to set up however you have to keep in mind that the user benefits greatly from this technique. Remember that 45% of web pages use this navigation because of it's efficiency and convenience.

$96 Billion dollars is how much money was spent online in 2003 by American consumers. The year before that was $76 billion. This is significant jump in any industry. That year online sales accounted for only 4.3% of overall American retail sales. This was four years ago and since then the industry has continued huge amounts of growth and internet opportunities are more available than ever before. It looks likes internet shopping is here for the long term. In business the most important factor for success is finding a market that is under served, if you can achieve this you have a direct path to all of the customers looking for a product or service that they cannot find. Right now there are many services and products on the internet that have a large customer base and no one to satisfy them.

Besides the huge market opportunity, the largest reason you need a website for your business is that it will give you an advantage over any of your competitors who are not using e-commerce methods like internet marketing. However simply having a website for your company isn't enough. To be successful you need three things.

1. First you need a well designed website that is going to keep your visitors there and is very simple to navigate and purchase from, without this you will lose customers in the time it takes to click the back button.

2. Secondly you must appear in the top search results for all the major search engines, if you can't be found why anyone would buy your product/service. A good website combined with search engine optimization will help you do this.

3. And finally your company needs to be realistic and competitive. This means that your company must have value, and because of the internet your pricing is going to have to be adjusted to whatever your competitors are already offering. The internet has reduced the chain of supply and because of this you cannot expect to have unreasonably high pricing and be successful even with a well marketed and well designed website.

As we look at future spending trends it becomes increasingly obvious that internet spending is increasing exponentially year after year. And because of this internet marketing is going to become paramount for every business. In addition to adults spending more time and money on the internet the future generations are being conditioned with new technology and their trust in the internet will be so strong that a much larger percentage of this generation will buy products online. In combination with the new generat

ion of internet shoppers there will also be many news ways to buy online from laptops to cell phones and handheld devices. The future is tomorrow, are you ready?

The internet gives us so many choices that if something isn’t particularly interesting it takes less effort to leave and find something new than it would to actually read through. This is why we need to seize every advantage we can. In web design much emphasis is placed on styles and imagery but more often than not these are overly artistic and not designed with a human in mind.

So what does a human look for? First it’s all about open              space. Lots of spacing makes information more accessible.

 

 

 

                                                           Then the reader searches in a pattern much like reading usually starting at the top left then working their way to the bottom right.

 

What else is important, how about font. Some users still have back-lit screens making artistic fonts more difficult to read such as

Georgia or Times New Roman

The best text to use is the defacto font of the United States government. When you see a STOP sign or any road sign it’s written in sans-seriff. Newspapers use this font also because of the split second chance to capture an eye, the simpler the text the more effective the message written in the text. So don't bunch a lot of text together, space out your information in a coherent way and use simple fonts like seriff, helvetica, arial or verdana and you're sure to gain the attention of your readers.

A conversion in the computer world is when a visitor to a website buys something. Your own website traffic means nothing without conversions, so the question remains how to convert visitors to customers. An internet business is just like any other business; usually you only have one chance to get it right because there are plenty of other places a customer can go to. This is why website design is paramount.

There are three main qualities your website needs to have in order to acquire a customer.

Website Appearance

1. The first is obvious; your website needs to be attractive. When a customer comes to your website, if it looks poorly made or even has unattractive coloring, it takes no effort for them to click out and find a better site. Remember it doesn't matter if you like it, unless your customer likes it.

Design Simplicity

2. The second quality; simplicity. Often time’s web designers get carried away and create a very fancy and artistic site, but forget about the user. When someone comes to your website they are looking for something be it information, a service or a product. Besides online marketing a visitor needs to within a few clicks of a mouse find exactly what they are looking for. The famous website Amazon.com has a policy that it should take no more than three clicks to find and purchase a product, perhaps this gives some insight to their success.

Web Usability

3. And finally the last important quality of your website design is something that is very often overlooked. Most computer users and even computer professionals assume everyone else is using the exact same things they are. However the world, just like the internet is a diverse place. There are all different kinds of internet browser such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Safari or Opera. There are also different operating systems like Windows, MAC OS or Linux. And there are even all different kinds of computers, internet speeds and even different languages. What’s even more overlooked is that people with disabilities such as the blind or vision impaired, use the internet as well.

There is so much breadth in the computer world and because of that when you are designing a website you need to make it compatible with every user you can. If not you would be shooting yourself in the foot by limiting the amount of potential visitors to your web site. So don't commit business suicide, use all these techniques and conquer web design...

"If you fail to plan, you plan to fail" Look at your business. What is your plan? Where will you be in 3 years and how will you get there? If you can answer these questions great you are on the right track. If not there is no better time to start than now. First things first, re-examine your own business, identify what you have to offer, what you want to achieve and most importantly how you're going to get there. A huge number of small business's fail within the first 3 years and the reason why is because most of these business have not taken a realistic look at their resources and failed to plan for the future and instead relied on surviving today or this month. The fact of the matter is without a business plan you've got rough waters ahead of you. Whether you're already operating an online business or you're looking to expand onto the Internet there are a few things you need to know. First off, it's not easy. Do not invest a lot of money into an extravagant website and just let it sit there. This is usually the first mistake business owner’s make, just because you have a website no matter how great it is that doesn’t really earn you anything unless you can get seen. Remember the old adage "location,location,location" well it applies as much to the internet as the real world. Your location on the internet directly affects your business performance. So how do you even begin to figure out where your location is and where you want it to be? Well for the novice this is nearly impossible. That’s why there are professionals; they handle the needs you cannot. This isn't one sided though. In this business situation it is very beneficial for both parties. The best way to begin this planning process is to solve your internal business problems. I suggest looking into http://www.utahsbdc.org/ or http://www.sba.gov/ut// or various other business website, these can be great resources for any business owner. If you feel you have no major internal issues to work on then we can begin to work on your internet marketing strategy. Consulting free resources and forums are a great place to start and get familiar with the industry and if you need consulting help, web site design, development of an internet marketing plan and SEO you can visit http://www.utahwebservices.com/ or www.wiworks.com